OTTAWA (AFP) — An older brother of the only Canadian held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was denied bail in Canada, where he has been jailed since 2005 for alleged arms sales to Al-Qaeda, a court said Wednesday.
Abdullah Khadr, 27, has been jailed in Toronto since he returned to Canada in 2005, and is fighting extradition to the United States where he would be prosecuted for allegedly selling arms to Al-Qaeda while living in Pakistan.
"Mr. Khadr is alleged to have supplied weapons to a notorious and ruthless terrorist organization with a proven record of killing innocent individuals on a massive scale," Ontario Superior Court Justice Gary Trotter wrote in his decision.
"I am hard pressed to think of a more serious set of offences."
Abdullah's youngest brother, Omar, remains in jail at the US "war on terror" detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He is accused of killing a US soldier.
Another brother, Abdurahman Khadr, has admitted on Canadian television that the family knew Osama bin Laden and that he and some of his siblings were trained by Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
At one time, around 1996, the Khadr family lived in a compound in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, where Abdurahman met bin Laden for the first time, he said.
Their father Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian national, was a suspected Al-Qaeda leader. He was killed in a gunbattle with Pakistani troops.
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